


Lost and Found

by Canaan



Series: Twins!verse [4]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-19
Updated: 2011-05-19
Packaged: 2017-10-19 14:16:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canaan/pseuds/Canaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jack spends hours going through Satelite Five, looking at the destruction.  Each time he comes across a body, he tries to remember the name.  Mostly, he can't."  Ten/Jack/Rose, AU after JE.  Spoilers for tPotW and JE (minor).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost and Found

**Author's Note:**

> Written for kholly as an incentive fic during the September 2009 Support Stacie Author Auction and very kindly beta'd by WMR. Kholly wanted OT3 and wasn't picky about the prompt, so you get something out of my ideas file, which means it's written out of order. Here's what you need to know: This takes place in a post-JE AU I haven't started writing, yet. The duplicate Doctor refused to help Ten abandon Rose in a parallel universe and he and Donna are elsewhere (yes, I have plans for them). Ten, Jack, and Rose are recently reunited and traveling in the TARDIS.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own them and I'm not making any money. All hail the Auntie Beeb and the crown prince of angst, RTD.

Jack spends hours going through Satelite Five, looking at the destruction. Each time he comes across a body, he tries to remember the name. Mostly, he can't. These were the men and women he'd killed--his last con, convincing them they had a comet's chance in the solar corona of surviving the Dalek onslaught and never telling them the Delta wave would take them, anyway. It was the best cause he'd ever had to pull a con. Every minute they bought the Doctor was one more minute the Time Lord would have to keep those things from taking over the universe.

Jack had never expected to live through the experience. He'd never dreamed he'd have to see the bodies, afterwards. All those open eyes stare at him from faces gone still and cold. Sapients he's led, flirted with, and fought for turned into so much meat.

He can't stop looking. Something drives him through the station's levels, seeking and searching. He isn't sure if he hopes he'll find it or hopes he won't. When he starts to see signs of the Daleks' downward passage, he feels ill. He chases them down to Satelite Five's bottom-most level, knowing all the while that he's too late. When he finally emerges from the faltering lift, a mountain of corpses greets him. His gorge rises and he swallows hard against the urge to vomit.

There are so many of them, but if Jack's learned one thing conning the Time Agency, it's persistence. He drags each stiffening body from the pile and lays it out at the end of the room. These were the cowards, but he can sympathize with that. They didn't deserve this. And there didn't seem to be so many of them when they were moving, talking, breathing sapients . . .

With no more than half a dozen bodies left in the pile, he's trembling with fear and muscle strain and on the edge of a terrible relief, that the thing he's looking for isn't here; that he'll be spared this. Then he sees a flash of blond hair peeking out from between two shoulders and utters a strangled wail. He has to shift three more corpses, but he knows what he'll find: Rose, her pale face frozen in a final expression of horror, those kissable lips gone blue and rubbery; and the Doctor flung over her in a last-ditch effort to save her, his sonic screwdriver still clutched in one hand and those storm-blue eyes dulled in death. Jack sinks to his knees, all the drive gone out of him, tears he'd promised he wouldn't shed seeping down his face--

"--Jack! Jack, wake up!" Jack gasps and mumbles something incoherent. Cool fingers stroke the small of his back and someone's shaking his shoulder. "'s okay, Jack, we're here, you're on the TARDIS," Rose says. "Nothing can get in here--hordes of Genghis Khan, remember?" She brushes the tears from beneath one eye with her fingertip.

Jack shudders and draws her tightly into his embrace, not even noticing the luscious curves pressed up against him, just that she's warm and alive and _here_. "And you wonder why I barely sleep," he breathes. "Sleeping's got nothing to recommend it."

The Doctor leaves off with his soothing caresses and spoons that cool, skinny body up behind Jack, getting an arm around both of them. "If you don't sleep, you can't have nightmares?" the Time Lord asks, quietly. "But you have to sleep sometime, Jack. We all do."

"What did you dream?" Rose asks.

He shudders in their embrace. "Satelite Five. Daleks." _Bodies I never saw. Bodies that weren't there . . ._ "I haven't had that dream in decades. A hundred seventy-odd ought to be a little old for nightmares." Rose kisses him quiet.

"Well, can't imagine why you'd be dreaming about Daleks after the last week or so," the Doctor says. "Completely unnatural, that."

"Shut it, Doctor," Rose says, tartly.

Jack can almost hear the Doctor's grin, behind him. He smiles. Then the other man sighs against his neck. "It was a mistake, Jack. But it's past. You're here now, and as long as there's a choice, I'm not leaving either of you again."

"Quite right, too," Rose says, her smirk just visible in the TARDIS's night lighting.

Jack shifts a little between them and stretches. "I don't know about you two, but I think I'm done with sleep for tonight."

Rose shifts against him in a way that's deliberately arousing. "Oh, I don't know. I could sleep again, later, but I'm definitely awake _now_. And there's some things I've missed over the last few years."

The Doctor makes a rude noise. "Humans. Doesn't matter _how_ old you get, you still feel some need to go at it like bunnies at all hours of the night--"

Jack squeezes Rose's bum with one hand, making her moan softly. "Doc, if that means you _don't_ want to help me shag Rose senseless, I'm completely prepared to go it alone." Rose leans in to kiss him again, and this time her lips part against his and they take turns nibbling and sucking at each other's lips and tongues.

The Doctor traces one long finger along all the places where their bodies are pressed together. "Oi! Never said that." Jack groans as cool fingers cup his balls.

"'m so glad I found you again," Rose whispers.

"It's fantastic," Jack agrees.

"It's brilliant," the Doctor says. He goes up on one elbow, kissing each of them in turn. "And so are you."


End file.
